You can't help but love a television show whose title includes both a horrified reaction and accurate description of its cast. The more exclamatory, the better. What's that you say? It takes place in a landfill? I am so there.
It was the Golden Age of Nicktoons. Aaahh!!! Real Monsters was one of those shows for which you can both appreciate its creativity and wonder how they let a kooky idea spiral so quickly into something so absurdly intricate. Remarkably, the good people at Klasky-Csupo managed to make our monster friends both wildly idiosyncratic and relatable all at the same time. The key was that, like us children of the 90s, these monsters were kids. They went to school, they had homework, they sought to rebel, and they feared punishment from adult authority. Sure, they were always popping out of toilets and their major aim in life was to frighten the daylights and/or nightlights out of innocent children like ourselves, but they possessed a certain quirky underlying quality which made us root for them the whole way.
The matter-of-factness with which the Monster Academy and its zany cast of characters was presented to us as children made these ridiculous beings seem almost plausible. We had no reason not to believe that a red bunny rabbit, a black and white candy cane wearing wax lips, and an amorphous smelly blob of play-dough holding eyeballs roomed together at boarding school at the dump and get themselves into all sorts of wacky comedic situations. The main characters possessed a more-than-adequate amount of human-like charm in their personality traits and behaviors; one was a neurotic worrywart, one a laid-back slacker, and the last an uptight wealthy perfectionist. They were 90s TV standards incarnate, made over into so-ugly-they're-cute preteen monsters.
For a children's cartoon, it was fairly dark. In fact, some children found parts of it downright frightening. The show was completely unapologetic about its premise and refused to "tone down" any characters who may have been perceived as, well, terrifying. The Monster Academy's headmaster, the Gromble, had a tough-love approach that involved a great deal of yelling, threatening, and eating students in a way not usually conducive to positive adult role models. Similarly, if our young monster friends misbehaved, they faced being subject to the dreaded Snorch's torturous punishments and incoherent ramblings. These punishments included such terrifying fare as group square dancing, and for any child forced to do-si-do in elementary school gym class, we understood the graveness of their concern.
Behold, the wondrous intro:
The monsters were so sweet and well-intentioned, we often forgot that their livelihood was frightening human children. Ickis, Krumm, and Oblina were a ragtag trio of preteen monsters trying to make it through their semester at Monster Academy unscathed.
Let's meet our heroes:
Ickis, neurotic crimson pipsqueak constantly mistaken for an adorable and distinctly unscary bunny rabbit. His scaring technique involved some form of self-inflation that ballooned him to several times his usual nonthreatening stature.
Krumm, resident slacker and all-around smelly cream-puff. His uncanny ability to frighten people with body odor alone iwas both remarkable and a bit disgusting. He also had the odd fortune of having to hold his eyeballs in hand as he was generally socketless.
Oblina, candy cane extraordinaire and token rich snob. Her supposedly cultured taste veered more toward the bacterial than the highbrow, consistent with her monster upbringing. She possessed enormous red lips and the ability to extract her internal organs from them en masse for the general gross-out scare factor.
Our squalid principals ran about wreaking havoc in a Monsters INC prequel-type fashion. Deep down, we knew them to be good, but they still had the power to scare the bejeezus out of us with their formidable antics. At the end of the day, however, we understood their motives and were willing to forget their propensity for apprehending unsuspecting children. After being taken in by a few good episodes, we too could picture ourselves rolling around in the trash after a long day of scaring, dodging Simon the Monster Hunter, and desperately trying to make ourselves look more repulsive to potential mates we were currently "squishing" on.
Aaah!!! Real Monsters took 90s sitcom conventions and turned them on their head; the cleverness of it was not lost on us, even as children. Not to mention that the innumerable tongue-in-cheek cultural references satiated any adult in the room, allowing them to chuckle and briefly forget the potentially dire psychological effects this gross-out humor was probably unleashing on their young, impressionable children.
Whether you viewed yourself more as an Ickis, an Oblina, or a Krumm, we all saw a little piece of ourselves in these allegedly real monsters. Maybe we weren't surfing the sewers or using toenails as currency, but we were experiencing the same pre-adolescent pitfalls as our monstrous counterparts. Being sentenced to detention may not have been quite as afflictive as a Snorching session, but we recognized the general idea.
If you have somehow lost your childhood sense of whimsy and imagination, fear not. Well, maybe fear a little bit, but there's still hope for you to enjoy this classic Nicktoon in all its first season glory on Itunes.
So cue up the old episodes and stay awhile. You too will be Hooked on Phobics in no time.
Check it out:
Aaahh!!! Real Monsters episode guide
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